A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

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Saturday, October 25, 2014

A CLARIFICATION

I am afraid that a phrase I wrote facetiously in a previous
post triggered a series of comments that somewhat missed the point I was trying
to make.Since the point is actually
rather important, I am going to try to spell it out at sufficient length to make
it clear and avoid misunderstanding.One
of the drawbacks of communication by blog post and comment is that people tend
to read quickly and not reflect on the deeper meaning of what is being said
[perhaps because so often there is no deeper meaning.]The offending passage in my previous post was
this:

“The simple truth is that none of the “liberation” movements
had an economically radical thrust.In
effect, their demands were variations on the same theme:We Want In!We demand to be and to be treated as first-class citizens, not
second-class citizens, of this capitalist society – which is, after all, just
another way of saying We Want To Be
Exploited Just Like White Men!”

Marx quite correctly judged Capitalism to be a radically
revolutionary social formation, invading and transforming every corner of the
society in which it grows and flourishes.He observed Capitalism destroying the age-old division between the city
and countryside.He observed it
destroying the old craft traditions and replacing them with machine production
requiring nothing more than interchangeable semi-skilled laborers.He observed Capitalism eroding the authority
of the church and the throne, expanding across national borders and erasing
cultural differences that in some cases were millennia old.One hundred and fifty years after he
published Capital, we can see this
process of destruction still at work on a global scale.

Despite the corrosive and transformative effect of the
spread of Capitalism, there remain in the contemporary world a number of
institutions and practices that exhibit what we might call pre-capitalist norms
and structures.Many of the calls for
change or movements to transform existing institutions and practices are, in
one way or another, efforts to complete the work of Capitalism, eliminating
pre-capitalist formations and perfecting, so to speak, the triumph of Capitalism.

Let me give some examples of these processes of change,
which are sometimes judged politically progressive and sometimes judged politically
reactionary, but which are au fond instances
of the same historical process.

If we look around us, we see a number of institutions that
exhibit traces, and sometimes more than traces, of pre-capitalist norms and structures.[Now, right here, I want you to pay close
attention and not jump in with clever comments to the effect that these
institutions are not really free if
the effects of Capitalism.You are just
going to have to trust that I do know that, and that I am trying to make a
deeper point that cannot be countered with a snappy radical-sounding comment.Really.]Think for a moment about three such institutions:the Church, the military, and the university.Each of these social institutions is older
than Capitalism – in some cases many millennia older.Each has internal norms and ideals that are
thoroughly pre-capitalist.And each has,
in quite different ways, been invaded and partially transformed, as it were, by
Capitalism.

The Church [either the Roman Catholic Church or the various
Protestant churches] is a quintessentially pre-capitalist institution whose
norms are prior to, and in many respect antithetical to, Capitalism.The Roman Catholic Church, for example, in
some of its iterations, has been deeply opposed to Capitalism, especially but
not exclusively in South America.Protestant
churches in the United States are notorious for fostering money-making scams
and sects, but these are not capitalist in their organization and norms, for
all that they are epitomes of greed.We
are instinctively offended by priests or pastors who view their pulpits as little
more than cash registers, whereas we are not in the same way [please note the words “in the same way” and their
meaning] offended by corporate C.E.O.’s who treat their corporations as
money-making operations.We expect a
corporation to seek to make money, for all that we may disapprove of
corporations as social formations.

The military, at least in America, has very considerably
resisted efforts to transform it into a capitalist institution.Its highest ranked officers make salaries no
larger than those of corporate middle managers; it celebrates and honors those
who exhibit courage under fire, regardless of whether those actions are in any
sense economically efficient; it announces and to a quite remarkable degree abides
by norms of behavior that are thoroughly pre-capitalist, for all that many of
its most successful upwardly mobile middle rank officers look and sound more
like MBA’s than fighting men and women.Once again, I beg you not to respond to these lines with knee-jerk
anti-military snarks.I don’t care
whether you like the Army or hate it.I
want you to look past that and see that the norms and behavior of those in the
army are different [not better or
worse, different] from those in a capitalist corporation.If you are simply unable to grasp that simple
fact, then go off into the woods with a copy of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft for several months and learn from Max
Weber.

A fascinating case study of what I am talking about is the
university, a late medieval institution whose internal norms and ideals are
currently under assault by the forces of capitalist transformation.The recruitment of corporate types as senior university
administrators, the substitution of cheap labor for a tenured professoriate,
the use of such metrics as FTE’s [fulltime equivalent student enrolments], the
demand that professors “pull their weight” by securing external funding for
research are all examples of the attempt to “put universities on a sound
actuarial footing," which is to say to transform them into capitalist
institutions.

Now, the point of my previous post was to call attention to
the important fact that many recent social movements that have been widely
understood as politically progressive or even revolutionary are in fact efforts
to replace pre-capitalist practices and norms with capitalist practices and
norms.Capitalism treats those who sell
their labor for wages as inputs into production, no different either in their
balance sheets or in their factories and offices from other inputs such raw
materials, machinery, or electricity.Distinctions within the labor force grounded in race, gender, religion,
ethnicity, or age are, from the perspective of pure capitalist calculation,
market imperfections that interfere with “the efficient use of scarce resources
with alternative uses,” to quote a classic definition of the subject matter of
the science of Economics.[This is so
even though Capitalism has from time to time used “imperfections” to hold down
wages.]

Thus, the long and successful Civil Rights Movement, perhaps
the premier liberation movement of my lifetime, was never an attack on
Capitalism [although many of its heroes and heroines, most especially W. E. B. DuBois,
understood the connection between Socialism and genuine liberation].The Women’s Movement, which took dead aim at
the injustices and inequalities of the oldest pre-capitalist social
institution, the Family, sought from the beginning the complete incorporation
of women into Capitalism, by way of
inclusion in the workplace and the political sphere, never the liberation of
women from Capitalism.And the same is true of the Gay Liberation
Movement that has recently achieved such remarkable success.

That is what I was trying, unsuccessfully, to say in my previous
post.I hope it is all bit clearer now.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.